Healing Complex Trauma with Internal Family Systems (IFS)

TraumaIFS

May 25

As a trauma specialist, people interested in therapy and coaching with me tend to have three primary modes:

I know I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’m ready to get into it!
I think I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’ll do it if I have to. (Are you sure there’s no other way…?)
I just want to feel better now - let's leave the past out of it.

The vast majority show up in one of the first two modes. They have some understanding of trauma, recognizing that some kind of past experience might be at the root of their current struggles. But even as they want to “face their past,” they also notice some frustration when they try to do that. That can be especially disheartening when so much of the Insta-therapy guidance can feel so simple: just get in there, hug your hurt inner child, and then you’re healed!

When someone in the third, “leave the past out of it,” mode comes in, the frustration with trauma work is more explicit. While I don’t put any pressure on getting into past traumas, by the time we do get to it, these clients usually share that they were so worried about being thrown back into overwhelming feelings that they didn’t want to even think about thinking about the past.

(Yes, there are people who come to therapy and coaching without heavy past trauma, but they aren’t usually the ones insisting that we “leave the past out of it.”)

What Trauma Work Is (and Isn’t)

Trauma work is the process of getting unstuck from the ways that the past already has control over how we experience and respond to the present, freeing us to live our lives with a greater sense of choice.

As long as we have trauma, we can’t avoid looking at it and expect that things will get better for us now. Anything that is unresolved from the past is already here, whether or not we want to admit it. Whether it’s because we are running away from the past, trying to avoid repeating it, or ignoring that it ever happened, our history will condition the life we’re living now until we resolve it.

But the good news for everyone is that trauma work is not about reliving our past. Reexperiencing that overwhelm does nothing to heal our trauma, and can actually make it worse.

It’s also not about blaming the past for everything that’s hard in the present and then calling it a day. And it’s not just skipping through a field holding hands with our inner child, either. We actually need to untangle ourselves from the past and take responsibility for ourselves in the present, which inevitably means engaging with all parts of ourselves. Even the ones that don’t seem like they would be so much fun to hang out with (even though, spoiler alert, they actually turn out to be pretty great!).

While there’s so much more to say about the challenges that come up when we are working with our trauma, one of the biggest barriers to stepping into “doing the work” is simply not knowing what the trauma healing process actually entails.

The oversimplification or exaggeration of what is involved does a huge disservice to everyone - especially those of us that most need it. Not having a realistic map of the process can lead us to judge ourselves for it being slower or harder than we expected, or even to abandon our efforts at healing when we might actually be on the right path. For others, an inaccurate map can lead us to dismiss trauma work from the get go.

My hope is that offering my version of this map might support others to orient themselves to what this process is really about, both creating realistic expectations and addressing some of the fears.

What is complex trauma?

Trauma comes from the Greek word for “wound,” and Gabor Mate sums it up well when he says that trauma is “not what happens to us, it's what happened inside of us. So trauma is not that somebody hit you in the head. Trauma is the concussion that you develop.”

The metaphorical blow to the head can be either an acute traumatic event or exposure to a chronically traumatic environment or relationship.

→ An acute traumatic event is a one-time, unexpected, and immediately overwhelming experience. It is often life- or health-threatening, whether for ourselves or someone else, and can include extreme boundary violations. When we are children and dependent on the adults in our lives, this can include any experience that threatens or interferes with our direct connection to our caregivers.

→ A chronically traumatic environment or relationship is one in which we are exposed over a period of time to either too much bad (i.e., verbal, physical, and sexual abuse) and/or too little good (i.e., neglect, absent parents).

“The concussion” then refers to the ways that a traumatic event, environment, or relationship live on inside of us, even when we are no longer directly experiencing them. That wound shows up in many ways, including:

painful beliefs and stories we carry about ourselves, others, and the world
emotional and visual flashbacks
coping strategies we developed in order to make sense of and survive the experience

As Frank Anderson explains, the extent to which the wound sticks around and remains unhealed is directly connected to the support we did or didn’t get at the time of the traumatic experience. When we are left alone to deal with and make sense of what we went through, that trauma wound remains alive in us well after the fact. It’s like breaking a bone and then never having it properly set - the bone tries to heal in the way that it can, but it is going to continue to hurt and our whole body has to adjust to live around it.

Complex trauma is the particular wound we get from being in a chronically traumatic environment in which we usually also experienced one or more acute traumatic events. We also did not have the support necessary to escape or manage it and had to resort to developing our own coping mechanisms to get through. Complex trauma symptoms can look similar to those that happen in the wake of an acute trauma, such as hypervigilance, intrusive memories or emotions, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. However, they also can include being shut down (such as reduced heart rate and lack of emotional expression), chronic dissociation, and difficulties with attachment and relationships.

One key experience that doesn’t get enough attention is that when people who have experienced complex trauma look back, they tend to feel confusion about what happened in the past. That confusion can be in addition to other feelings such as terror, pain, or sadness. However, more often than we might expect, it’s just the confusion. The absence of other feelings can lead us to question whether the things we experienced really were all that traumatic. We might think, “Well, if it was so bad, then I would feel worse than I do.” Or maybe we can see that the experience was objectively bad, but we might say to ourselves, “It must not have affected me as much as it would affect other people because I didn’t have a lot of feelings about it.”

This confusion or absence of other feelings is actually evidence that we had to protect ourselves from something that was beyond our capacity to process or even understand at the time it happened. Often that self-protection takes the form of dissociation, which can contribute to the sense of confusion by impacting how we store and recall traumatic memories.

Approaches to Healing Complex Trauma: The Dance Between the Past and the Present

The process of healing trauma involves two primary tasks:

Creating a safe-enough present.
Healing the wounds from the past.

Most approaches to healing, whether in the form of therapy or coaching, tend to bet on either one or the other.

Top-down approaches focus on creating a safe-enough present through things like developing healthy habits (such as getting enough sleep and exercise), challenging thought patterns or beliefs that aren’t reflective of our current reality, or focusing on gratitude for what we have now. All of this essentially tries to communicate to the system that it is okay to “let go” of the past trauma and directly connect to the safe-enough reality of the present.

Bottom-up approaches focus on healing the past trauma directly. The idea is that untangling where we’re stuck in the past will ultimately lead to the desired changes in the present. Those interventions might be more focused on working with what’s going on in the body or they might look like the popularized concept of “inner child work,” including how the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach is usually framed.

However, my experience is that without engaging both of these perspectives, neither one fundamentally works. On the one hand, we can end up using things like working out and positive thinking to simply cover over or push down the past hurts. On the other hand, we can focus so much on healing the past hurts that we neglect the things that we could be doing to feel better now (however small they might seem to be), unintentionally continuing to recreate the lack of safety from the past in the present.

Instead, real trauma healing looks like moving between healing the past and tending to the present, responding to what is needed in a particular moment. While IFS is generally considered to be a past-focused bottom-up approach, it also includes engaging with and supporting the parts of us who might be able to offer some top-down support to the system. IFS facilitates us to move towards a safe-enough present right alongside healing the past.

In IFS, the aspect of ourselves that can move between the past and the present is called the Self. It is the inherent aspect of every person that can communicate calm, compassion, and understanding to all of the parts of our internal world, ultimately supporting them to work together to heal the past and continue to create a safe-enough present. As we grow our capacity to connect with the Self, that dance of moving between these two tasks happens directly in sessions themselves as well as over the course of a week, month, or even our whole lives.

(Read more about IFS: What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)? Part I & Part II)

The Map of Healing Complex Trauma

When we’ve experienced trauma, the past and the present function as totally different countries. They have completely different languages and do not have an effective way to communicate or work with one another.

In the healing process, the Self acts as a mediator and translator between the land of the past and the land of the present. As the Self goes back and forth between the two, it creates a bridge connecting them that ultimately facilitates our past trauma to resolve and no longer condition our lives in the present.

The Land of the Past

The parts that live in the past are stuck in the circumstances surrounding our past trauma and are usually completely unaware of the reality of the present. That includes the fact that we are adults, that (as long as it is true) we are no longer in the dangerous situation where our initial trauma happened, and that we have far more resources than we did at the time. They are suspended in that traumatic past, unable to access the wisdom, circumstances, and support that might be available now.

But how (and why) would that even happen?

Extremely overwhelming experiences essentially overload our nervous system. That leads both the hippocampus (the part of our brain that “knows time”) and the amygdala (the part of the brain connected to our fear response and emotional processing) to be unable to process and integrate what happened. The experience then never gets filed away as being over or resolved, creating a sort of “living memory” that exists inside of us in a suspended, timeless loop. When something now reminds us of what happened to us then (or even how we felt when that thing happened to us), our nervous system plugs right back into that living memory, and we experience it as if no time has passed.

For most of us, the majority of these “living memories” show up in the form of old sensations or feelings that don’t make sense in the present (implicit memories). Other times we have “picture memories” (explicit memories) where we literally see fragments of a memory or relive painfully vivid scenes. In IFS, we refer to the parts of us that carry these memories that we try to keep out of our conscious awareness as “exiles.”

When we are in touch with either implicit or explicit trauma memories, our brain lights up in exactly the same way as it would if we were living that experience directly. And when that is happening, the parts of our system who live in the land of the present, the ones that would know that the experience of the memory is not reflective of the current reality, cannot reach the land of the past to help these triggered parts.

The protective parts that are stuck in the past with this living memory then jump in to immediately put out the fire and get away from the experience of that living memory. IFS refers to these short-term-solution-focused parts “firefighters.” When things are calm, and as long as that memory continues to live unintegrated and unresolved in some corner of our system, other parts of us then get back to work preventing us from ever having that experience again. In IFS, these are the forward-thinking, preventative “managers.”

Whether these protectors function in the short- or long-term, they both assume that the threat held in the living memory is real and relevant now. Because, as far as they are concerned, it is: at any moment, we could be thrust back into the intolerable and overwhelming experience of our trauma as if it were happening again now.

And they won’t believe anyone who might deny or minimize their experience.

The Land of the Present

Assuming that we do live in a safe-enough present, there are usually parts of us who know that the situation or environment now is not the same as the past. These present-dwelling parts might say that we are “over-reacting” when we have intense emotions that don’t seem to match the reality of a current situation, or feel confused by the flashbacks or intrusive memories that seem to have nothing to do with what is happening in “real life.” Like the protective parts stuck in the past, they can include firefighters that react intensely when the past infringes on the present as well as managers who try to prevent the past from leaking into our lives now.

To vastly oversimplify, many of these parts are connected to our prefrontal cortex (PFC) alongside other elements of our nervous system which are associated with logic, reasoning, and the direct perception of the present. Many of these parts of us have the capacity to validate, calm, or help integrate the triggered response. However, in the moment of initial overwhelm or trauma, this connection didn’t or couldn’t happen inside of us, usually because no one outside of us was there to support that process. As a result, it’s as if the living memory from the past is stored in a completely different universe, unreachable by these present-oriented parts that know the past is over. This can also mean that the parts in the present don’t have an accurate sense of how bad the past really was.

These present-oriented parts are often the ones that bring us to therapy, hoping that the rest of the system can catch up to their reality. They recognize that the coping skills that used to serve us in the past are no longer doing the job and may actually be causing us harm now. Because they might also minimize the intensity of our past trauma, these parts can also judge and shame us for our big feelings and how we try to deal with them and more or less tell us to “just get over it.”

In their frustration with the ways that the parts stuck in the past interfere with our lives now, their agenda can become either to try to get rid of those parts completely or to “heal” them as quickly as possible (usually another version of trying to get rid of them, but just said more nicely).

One tactic is to shout louder and louder in an attempt to get the parts stuck in the past to hear them. They might say things like, “What’s happening now isn’t the same as what happened then - you’re fine now! You’re an adult now and you aren’t stuck or helpless in the ways you were when you were younger! Let it go and just be in the present!” But just like shouting at someone who doesn’t understand the language you are speaking, it doesn’t do much good and can lead to a lot of frustration.

Another approach is to muffle, repress, or shut down the parts stuck in the past, like trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker. But unlike a real-life pressure cooker where the pressure stops building when it’s done cooking, the pressure from the past just keeps increasing until the lid can’t hold anymore and eventually blows.

The harder the parts in the present try to fix, “heal,” or shut down the past, the more the parts in the past feel misunderstood and rejected. They become more and more reluctant to hear the perspective of the present, often retaliating by becoming even louder or more intense.

This dynamic can lead the present parts to give up entirely on the whole healing project, seeing the parts stuck in the past as a lost cause and evidence of simply being fundamentally broken.

Self: The Translator and Mediator

No matter how hard the parts living in the present try to get across the message about the reality of our current circumstances, and no matter how hard the parts in the past try to convey their ongoing pain and overwhelm, the parts on their separate islands just can’t hear each other.

At least not without the Self acting as a translator and mediator.

The work of the Self involves both creating a safe present and healing past wounds. It sees where there might be parts of us in the present that, with support, can do some more immediate self-care to make the present even safer. At the same time, it recognizes where there is some past healing that needs to be done, allowing those stuck parts to process the pain and suffering of the past and freeing them up to be willing to access the relative safety of the present.

The key here is that we do not visit the past in order to relive the things that happened then. And we also do not get sucked into the fixing/repressing project of the present-oriented parts. We find the sweet spot where there is both space and connection, where we are not either overwhelmed and anxious or shut down and intellectualizing. The role of the therapist or coach here is to facilitate the client to access this internal space in themselves, and to bring that energy to support all of their parts equally.

This process starts to build a bridge connecting the two worlds, such that the previously disconnected parts start to actually hear and understand one another. It is via this bridge that the parts stuck in the painful or unsafe past can eventually choose to cross over into the safe-enough present. This experience literally correlates with changes in the activity of and connections between the different parts of our brain and nervous system implicated in trauma.

Where to Start

While there is fundamentally no “right order” to whether we start with the present or past, there are a couple of guidelines that can be helpful.

The first is that trauma work is meant to be done when the present is relatively safe enough compared to the past. That doesn’t mean it has to be perfectly safe or that there has to be no stress or even pain in the present. It just has to be safe enough so that when the parts of us stuck in the past look to the present, it is actually experienced as safer than whatever they went through. When that is not the case, the initial focus should be on being with, honoring, and making space for the current pain and stress. If and when it’s possible, then we can move into making changes to the current situation that would allow safety enough for the trauma healing to happen.

However, if we are completely overwhelmed by the direct experience of implicit and/or explicit trauma memories or intense protectors, the first step then becomes acknowledging and (lovingly) getting some space from those parts. We do this not to run away from them or because they are bad or wrong, but in order to create enough space to actually hear and tend to what is going on inside of us. When we are that overwhelmed, this step may need to be facilitated more directly by an IFS practitioner because there is usually little to no capacity to do that for ourselves in those moments.

The Destination: An Integrated Present

As we go back and forth, tending to both the present and the past, we literally rewire and update our brain and nervous system to both honor our past experiences and to be aligned to our present-day reality. It’s not that we forget what happened to us in the past and just live happily ever after. Yes, we still remember the past, including how much it hurt and what we learned from the experiences we had. The key is that when we do remember it, we don’t relive it anymore. And we no longer project it onto the present.

Because here’s the thing - trauma healing work doesn’t mean that we will never have overwhelming or even terrifying experiences again in our lives. It just means that our system won’t mistake our less overwhelming experiences now for the more intensely overwhelming experiences we have faced in the past. We become more able to discern the reality of our current situation, allowing us to more effectively choose how to respond.